


A Kingdom of Ashes

by A Kiss of Fire (TigerDragon), Bright_Elen



Series: Prisons Without Bars [3]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Canon Compliant, Civil War, Confrontations, Escape, Exile, F/F, F/M, Family, Obsession
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 17:09:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2356076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a nation falls and a new one rises, what happens to all the pieces of the world before the revolution - the ones that don't wind up shot and buried in a shallow grave? Do they fade into nothing, dust going down into dust, or is there an accounting that has to be made for what has been done and left undone?</p><p>And did anyone really think that Minerva Snow, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark were entirely finished with each other?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is it - the last of it. When Tiger and I finished _Every Inch But One _, I knew that the story wasn't finished. That there was one more piece of the narrative that had to be told, one more question that needed answering.__
> 
>  
> 
> _  
> _It's taken me three and a half years, which seems like a long time for the short number of words, but this is that answer as best I can tell it. For those of you who've followed the series, thank you for your time and your patience.__  
> 

Three bodies are still cooling on the floor in the corridor when I step past the pools of crimson stagnating around them and examine the room where my _mendacem_ was safely stored until sixty-eight minutes ago. The portrait of Katniss, wreathed in flame and weapon drawn, stares back at me over his empty bunk. The small floating forensic drone continues its methodical work in one corner, looking for some scrap of evidence that the surveillance system might have missed.

It is wasted effort, but I allow it to continue. For the moment, at least, I have no interest to spare it. The outline of the situation, as unsubtle as it is, demands my full attention.

Insertion could have been handled in any of a dozen ways, and investigating it will prove as futile as it will simple. The rebellion has been cultivating networks of discontent in the Capitol for a generation, and the dozens of cells my Minders have located or my Destabilization teams have neutralized in the past month only means that they are willing to spend resources because they have more in reserve. My people will find a few more dupes willing to die for the myth of freedom, eliminate them, and accomplish nothing. It is fighting the tide with a bucket, but my father will insist on it.

The door - unmarked, except for the narrow black box pressed to the access panel - and the cleanly cut chains are more telling. Latier’s work. A crude but effective workaround, bypassing and locking out the entire security mechanism to access the door hydraulics directly, and a team equipped with cutting bars to deal with restraints. Not to mention the anticipation needed for the soldier on point to be carrying a device capable of shutting down the feedback collar without setting off any of its several security measures.

The man is becoming something of an irritation.

A moment’s further review of the room produces only scant furniture and intact murals. There is nothing else here, and little enough between this cell and the maintenance access to the exterior of the building that there is no point in following the trail. Just a handful more bodies, some blood on the floor that has already been typed and matched as a probable for Gale Hawthorne of District Twelve.

There were eight of them, and they knew exactly where they were going. What they intended to do. Who they were looking for and where to find them. They knew, and they bluffed Diana into withdrawing even the Peacekeepers normally detailed to me for a fruitless effort at taking doors and finding the source of Katniss Everdeen’s broadcasts. They were my sister’s to command and I, closeted with my father, had no opportunity to argue. My adjusters, whose bodies are still slowly seeping blood onto the cold metal of my floors, were left protected only by a secrecy that had already been compromised.

With a few off-duty exceptions, I am as bereft of technicians as I am of living prisoners. Those my uninvited guests did not or could not take with them, they killed. There is nothing more I can do here - not for my lost prizes and not for the dead. But I am still reluctant to leave, and it is only after a few minutes of silent hesitation that I can understand why.

It is a concession of defeat. An admission that Peeta Mellark, Johanna Mason and Annie Cresta are gone beyond recovery, that nothing I see or do here will return him to me.

But there is nothing else to be done, and I do not have time for self-indulgence.

I leave the dead to bury the dead.

* * *

Neither my adjusters or my guards have been replaced. It would be easier to bear if it were some form of punishment, some message of disappointment from my father which may be made right in good time, but the truth is colder and simpler: I have been forgotten. The Districts have fallen, my elder sisters speak of nothing but the coming fight for the Capitol - of the slaughter they intend to make of the rebels in the streets, as though any number of dead soldiers will break the back of this rebellion when the Districts have had a taste of independence and found it to their liking.

If they had any interest in listening to Ceres, they would know that we will starve long before we can kill all the rebels. If they listened to me, they would know that hearts and minds are the battleground that matters - the ground of which we have already lost so much. But Juno and Diana see only a problem to which they wish to apply their particular hammers, and my father has chosen to heed his elder daughters over Ceres and I. Perhaps, if we are luckier than our folly so far deserves, their tools will be enough to buy a little breathing space.

I doubt it.

I pass through the dark halls and black rooms of my private dominion in silence, alone except for the automated systems that are failing one by one for want of maintenance. It will be years before enough of them break down that my work could not be done in this place. I know with cold certainty that they will no longer be mine long before that happens. Perhaps they will no longer exist at all.

Down a corridor no different than any other, a door no different from any other waits. I stand before it and let the computers examine me, and when they recognize me the door slides open in silence. The room beyond is a void of not quite perfect darkness, illuminated only by the faint blue glow of a screen mounted on a pillar at its center and the ghostly reflections of that glow which gutter into nothingness, and I pass through into the shadows accompanied only by the faint echo of my muffled heels on the crystalline surface beneath me.

The door closes behind me. I draw the glove from my left hand and rest it on the soft blue glow, feeling the coolness of the glass warm every so faintly with my touch and the work of the scanner beneath. Then the glow goes out. Again, I have been recognized.

I draw the glove back on in an inky blackness more perfect than even the night outside my northern estate. “Initiate Panopticon.”

Light and color and sound flood over me from every direction. Training, conscious and otherwise, resolves sixteen hundred scenes - displayed across the surface of the globe that rises above me and curves below the transparent floor on which I stand - from senseless babble into discrete fragments, scenes from an unfolding tragedy whose acts and themes are invisible to the players. Some of them are live recordings, others simulations synthesized from reports, others propos snapped up from the broadcasting system; some are graphical representations of data and still others the narration of the Minders who prune and maintain the vast network of informants and cameras which feed information to me. Grouped over time by subject and theme, new scenes of possible import scatter like fresh puzzle pieces across a board of half-formed shapes, ready to be fitted where they belong.

No amount of training, of course, can make a human mind capable of consciously engaging with even half a percent of the data pouring into the Panopticon display. Its purpose is the same as scattering the pieces of a jigsaw on the table and letting one’s eyes roam over them - to provide grist for what poets would call the glory of intuition and scientists would identify as pattern recognition. A gesture read by the sensors mounted around me is enough to pull a scene or cluster of information from its place on the globe and hover it before me where it can be played forward and backward, examined, analyzed, then put back into its proper context.

The idea came to me in a dream when I was fourteen, a vision of being brought to the top of an impossibly tall building at the heart of the Capitol from which I could see all of Panem spread out beneath me. Developing the software alone - in careful secrecy, of course - demanded a decade before it became truly useful. The feeder networks, hidden relays and camera clusters (concealed and otherwise) took even longer, even with the foundations of previous Ministers of Information to build on.

Even more than the art I practice in the black rooms, the Panopticon is my creation and mine alone.

Now, much like the empire I have watched through it since I was barely more than a girl, it is dying.  Dulled images of old data hang like rotting fruit, untouched by updates, and long scars of black absence thread through the spaces where new data ought to be spilling in. Coin’s counter-intelligence teams have been hard at work, helped by the resistance cells which have blossomed like clusters of interlocking vines into something like governments for the Districts where the existing power structure failed to simply go over to the revolutionary side entirely. Identified surveillance systems have been destroyed and rerouted, secret transmission hubs discovered and smashed, informants shot down in the street or terrified into silence by the possibility of being caught. A few of my Minders, wise enough to taste which way the wind is blowing and more afraid of what the new regime might do to them than the holds I have on them, have vanished and taken the feeds from their networks with them. In truth, I am surprised more of them haven’t. Perhaps they fear me more than dying, or perhaps they continue to monitor their failing systems and vanishing agents because - like me - they love Panem too much to turn away. Perhaps some of them even think that we may still find victory. Their reports suggest it.

I see too much, even through the darkening fog beginning to close around me, to allow myself that illusion more than occasionally. The only question left, barring some favor from the gods I don’t believe in, is whether we’ll fall to our enemies or burn in nuclear fire.

Knowing that, I am not sure why I spend my hours watching the drama play out. Perhaps, somehow, I am looking for proof I could be wrong. Perhaps I feel some perverse duty to chronicle what is happening, to store it away in digital memory that no one will ever see. Perhaps simple inertia drives me to do what I have done for more years than I care to number, regardless of the futility of it.

Or perhaps I am drawn back to this room now for the same reason I was drawn to the Games last year and to the Games the year before that - to watch my _gladiatora_. As my sources diminish, she looms perpetually larger in what remains. It is an exquisite pain to watch her at work, at rest, in battle, in laughter.

I see little of my _mendacem_. I know they have him under guard, away from prying cameras. I know some of them doubt his sanity. I know that he has not, as my father hoped, broken Katniss. Not in a way that would make her useless to our enemies, at least.

She will come to the Capitol, and she is going to kill us if she can. It is a work we have trained her exquisitely well for, and nothing - not Coin, not our former gamesmaster, not all Diana’s Peacekeepers or Juno’s mutts - will stop her.

When I read Mesomedes’s hymn to Nemesis as a child, I had no idea she could be so beautiful.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The broadcast that tells me my _gladiatora_ is dead wakes me from the first real sleep I’ve had since the rebels carved out their ten block in Sector 38 and reduced my eldest sister to virtually incoherent rage. Juno hasn’t left her building since, barely communicated except to demand more resources for production of the muttations she’s been breeding these past months in anticipation of the opportunity to unleash them on the rebels. She and Diana together have spent decades layering defense upon defense in the streets of the Capitol as a sort of game, as if it were an arena to trap any riot or District incursion in. I don’t think either of them ever imagined it would actually happen. The reality that filled Juno with murderous fury has flooded Diana with a kind of sullen bloodlust - she lost her good humor permanently the day that District 2 fell, and she no longer speaks of winning the war. Only of slaughtering the rebels to the last man. If she had the authority for a nuclear strike instead of my father, we would all be smoke and ashes already.

Still half-wrapped in the sheets, I watch soldiers of the rebel army cluster around their fallen leader and then flee the black wave of one of Juno’s traps. I barely hear the commentators gloating as my sleep-drenched mind catalogs the faces I know - Lucas Boggs, Ellen Jackson, Pollux, Castor, Cressida, Finnick Odair, Gale Hawthorne, Peeta Mellark. Katniss Everdeen. I watch the survivors retreat into an apartment, leaving their dead to the hungry eyes of the cameras.

More useless commentary. I wait, my lungs empty of air, the few precious seconds until the next view of the street spills on the screen. Diana’s Peacekeepers blowing the whole row of apartments into dust and burning ruin. Then live footage, the apartment block burning, a reporter mouthing meaningless phrases.

 _Dead._ I shake the word away, still sluggish, but the prickle in the back of my mind that tells me I’ve missed something won’t let emotion form yet. “Isolate frames, mark minus one hundred seconds and mark minus four minutes. Display side by side. Mark.”

The computer obeys. On the left, I see Katniss dragging her squad leader, his legs blow into ruin, the shadow of the wave starting to fall over them. On the right, Diana’s Peacekeepers firing on the apartment. “Reverse right frame ten seconds.” Now they’re only aiming, the smoke of their weapons erased. “Reverse left frame two seconds.” The shadow of the wave recedes slightly. “Enhance.”

The images focus to crystalline clarity. I stare at them, through them, letting my mind cut through the surges of tangled emotion to find the missing piece.

When I do, my lips pull back over my teeth in something that is not at all a smile. The quality of the light is different. Not a few minutes difference, but at least a quarter of an hour. Too long. A trained soldier could cover two miles over open ground in that time. Even over the gel and broken terrain of the apartment blocks, my _gladiatora_ will have travelled blocks.

Until I see a body, I will know she is not dead. Emotion abates and cold reason settles my mind.

My father will make a statement. Diana will insist that her Peacekeepers made the kill, Juno that her devices set the trap. All of them will be certain that, Katniss Everdeen dead, the rebellion will begin to fracture. Nothing I can say to them will make them understand how wrong they are.

I order my media system to display official emergency broadcasts only, then push the sheets away and cross to the marble bathroom where my shower is waiting. I bathe and dress methodically, using the discipline of it to clear my mind further. There are more steps now than there were a few weeks ago. For my purpose at this moment, that fact is helpful.

I’ve only been finished long enough to begin trailing my fingers over the well-used books by my bedside in search of a further ward against impatience when my father appears on my screens. I know by the staging what he’s going to say, and by the overabundance of blush on his cheeks that his prep team was in a hurry or distracted. Probably by one or both of my elder sisters ranting in the background. My dignity ought to be offended that I didn’t rate a call to ask for my input or analysis, but I find I’m past caring. The last time either of my sisters or my father had words for me was Diana’s icily polite demand to turn over my handful of assigned hovercraft for her last attempt at breaking the rebel hold on their enclave. I agreed under protest.

Naturally, she lost them all.

My father is just a few words into the portion of his speech in which he’ll proclaim himself ready to offer clemency to any rebel who’ll turn on their comrades and admit the error of their revolution (a lie, of course, but a useful one) when the broadcast cuts out with the smoothness of an administrative override and Alma Coin replaces my father on the screen. It’s the first close-up image I’ve seen of her in some time - her security arrangements are unusual sensible - and the years have carved the delicacy from her face entirely.

Her skill for performance is a sharp as ever, and her eulogy for Katniss is exquisitely prepared. I can only imagine how long her writers have been sitting on it, updating it meticulously with each new wrinkle of my _gladiatora_ ’s exploits. By the time she’s finished and they’ve cut to a photograph as carefully stylized as one of Peeta’s portraits, every rebel soldier in the Capitol must be on fire with their desire to finish the job in the Mockingjay’s name.

Icily composed, my father is waiting when the interrupt drops out. His two sharp sentences fall like small stones in a tempest, mattering not at all. I can already see in his eyes that he’s thinking about planning the execution of whatever unfortunate technicians allowed the emergency channel to be breached.

I hear the anthem of Panem playing over our seal, and suddenly there are tears on my face. When I try to blot them away, I find my hand shaking.

My city, my _country_ , is finished.

The war is over.

We’ve lost.

It doesn’t matter that Diana’s Peacekeepers are still fighting on the streets, or that Juno is still breeding her mutts, or that my father is still broadcasting speeches. It doesn’t even matter whether they find my _gladiatora_ ’s body under that apartment block once they dig it up.

The certainty hardens in my chest. It hurts more than I could have imagined anything hurting before this moment. Excepting a few small pleasures, I’ve given my whole life to Panem - my skills, my talents, my time and effort, my passions. The possibility of a husband, a wife or children, the chance for a lifetime of study, any scruples I ever had, I’ve laid all of it on the altar of my country and my father’s reign in the iron certainty that my devotion was worthy and necessary. That peace and prosperity and power were my accomplishments, laurels for the legacy that would pass to Ceres’s daughter in the course of time.

All of it for nothing.

For nothing.

I don’t know how long I cry, but when it’s done I feel as empty and cold and clear as the winter sky over the forests of District Seven. I stand up and brush a fingertip along a control, letting the dull edge of pre-dawn light spill over the room from the screen that simulates a window. My computer paints a blinking red bar across the avenue the sun is going to rise across, warning me that a message from my father has been waiting for almost two hours. I dismiss it with a touch. If Peacekeepers haven’t broken down the door, what he has to tell me no longer matters. Most likely it’s a confirmation of what I already know in my bones - Katniss Everdeen is still alive.

A dozen steps bring me to the desk and my work terminal. I don’t bother to bring up the screen. The keystring I enter is one I have never used before, one which has no official record on any system in the Capitol, but the computer knows it at once. A moment passes, and then a small musical tone plays.

I am no longer under surveillance. Even six months ago, I would now be ten minutes or less from a visit with Diana’s Peacekeepers and a long, potentially fatal talk with my father. Even in their present manpower-starved state, it ought to take my father’s security team less than an hour to realize what I’ve done, but today I suspect it may be longer. If my gladiatora has humiliated him by surviving his pronouncement of his death, every available pair of eyes and hands will be devoted to hunting her.

Still, time is of the essence. I strip on my way to the bathroom, leaving my clothing carelessly on the floor. The compartment concealed behind the mirror array takes less than a minute to open, empty and reclose. From the side pocket of the bag inside, I take the bottles of solvent I need. The cleansing pads are already waiting among my beauty supplies. Closing my eyes to protect them, I do the work by feel.

When I open my eyes again, a stranger looks back at me from the mirror.

I applied my first permanent makeup before I was thirteen. My personal cosmetic artist elaborated and perfected it for years until I was fully satisfied, and his replacement maintained the design exquisitely. Six weeks ago, when I summoned one of the Capitol’s least notable experts in cosmetics and instructed him to remove all of it, he assumed I must have a new style in mind. When I asked him to program an applicator mask to apply the exact designs he’d just removed in high-resistance cosmetics, he was understandably confused but compliant. His confusion was as short-lived as his future, but he was proficient in his trade. The solvents function perfectly.

I have, in every sense that matters, removed my own face. My unadorned features are attractive but unfamiliar; more importantly, they are unlikely to be recognized. My hair comes next - a delicate manipulation of the bonding edge that holds the wig I’ve been wearing for the last ten days is sufficient to release it and send it spilling in ebony waves to the floor. Only the faintest hint of fresh black in my roots disturbs the downy blonde of my newly close-cropped locks. The false metallic nails go last, leaving the delicate translucence of my newly regenerated fingernails exposed for a moment before I cover them with a plain leather pair of gloves.

The unadorned uniform of a Peacekeeper logistics clerk from the bag and a pair of neatly polished boots from the back of my closet complete my ensemble, and I sling the carryall over my shoulder before giving the rooms that have been my home for years a last look.

I will never see them again.

“Activate Cortez,” I tell the computer, and then open the door. Step out. Close it behind me. I will be out of the building before the incendiary charges I’ve left behind reduce everything inside to sterilized ash. It is important, I remind myself, not to hurry. My digital cloak of invisibility will last long enough for me to vanish into the chaos on the streets, so my greatest danger is that some Peacekeeper or hysterical official I pass in the corridors takes notice of me. Measured certainty is the order of the day.

When I presented Diana with my small arsenal of hovercraft, I gave up every ship I was officially allocated. The hovercraft waiting for me in a small, automated hangar not reflected on the building plans of the tower in which it hides was declared damaged beyond worthwhile salvage in a training accident seven years ago. Its rebuilt engines, optimized for low thermal signature, were already waiting after being declared unfit for use by a quality control agent with several highly indiscreet hobbies the year before. The computer-controlled maintenance systems which installed the customized electronics built by contracted engineers from District Three who never saw a complete schematic were already prepared for its arrival and began reconstruction with a mechanical unconcern for the lack of economy involved.

Of course, I expected to be using it to flee a palace coup by one of my elder sisters. Still, it will serve my need now. I ignore the panicked refugees crowding the streets and the distant echo of explosions that tell me the fighting has resumed in earnest. Nobody spares me more than a glance on the street. I am less than a block from the tower when I see a mother, absurd in her formal gown, shake herself from her stupor to take the hands of her two weeping daughters. The image, a fragment of passing unimportance, lodges in my head and refuses to slip away. After seven more even steps, my feet will not take another.

 _Prim!_ It’s Katniss Everdeen’s voice echoing in my head now, the memory of her face alive with desperation. _I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!_

Every moment I stand here in the street increases my risk. Increases the chances that I will be identified or questioned or simply be standing in the wrong place when a mortar shell turns the street around me into bloody carnage. Every moment I stay in the Capitol puts the odds less in my favor.

But I can’t push the image out of my mind.

The first thing that will happen when Coin and her revolutionaries succeed in taking the Capitol is that my father and as many of his daughters and advisors as they can capture will be publicly executed. The four of us have been kept out of the vids, out of the glare of public view, but Coin is too shrewd an operator not to know we exist. Not to be ready to display our exposure and deaths as a morality play for the masses. As surely as the tributes in the Hunger Games, our lives will be finished.

My father and my elder sisters have brought this on themselves. If they haven’t made their own provisions for escape, they will not welcome mine. But Ceres - bright, generous, trusting Ceres with her head full of numbers and her concern for the health of Panem - will have made no plans. My youngest sister will still be studying her books and trying to ration what supplies remain that have not been hoarded in the Capitol when Coin’s soldiers smash in her door and take her to wait for execution.

_I volunteer as tribute._

It is nine long and potentially deadly blocks to the administrative building in which my sister will be working at this hour. The lines of Peacekeepers protecting this section of the city could break at any time. The forged credentials in my pocket may or may not get me past whatever security is holding her building, assuming they are even checking papers instead of shooting potential intruders on sight.

An unimportant speck in the sluggish disorder of the street, I start to run.

The lobby of Ceres’s building is stripped of guards, occupied instead by the brightly-colored flotsam of families thrown out of their homes by the fighting. A quick interface of my holomap with the building’s security tells me that, unable to access the secured lifts without a pass, the human tide has crept up nine floors or so before coming to an exhausted stop. Few of them glance at me - the panic that still periodically drives those in the street into convulsions has left them too drained of energy to do more than cluster together in families or collections of neighbors and attempt some semblance of rest. By the time anyone has a chance to be startled by the fact that the lift doors open for me, they’ve already closed. Alone in the elevator, I take a suppressed pistol from my bag and flick the safety off, then lower it to my side where the curve of my hip mostly conceals it.

My sister’s office is on the ninety-seventh floor. The hallways are abandoned, the broad windows that spill light deep into the building’s core fractured by the distant thunder of explosions, and I am already past the outer offices and into the security vestibule before the three guards who’ve held their position - out of loyalty or fear of what might be waiting outside - stir awake in alarm.

In the enclosed space, the pistol is about as loud as a thick book dropped on marble. They are all dead before they can rise to their feet. I lower the pistol again, tap an override code into the security panel, then open the door.

My sister, washed in sunlight through the broad windows she does not know are designed to resist explosions and heavy-caliber rifles, is still at work on her terminals. Her soft auburn hair and fine green robes give her the aspect of her namesake - goddess of the harvest, grain, fertility. I’ve nearly reached her desk when she looks up, startled, her wide blue eyes searching my face without recognition for a long moment before she surprises me into immobility in turn. “Minerva? What have you done to your hair?”

For a few seconds, I can’t think of a single thing to say. Then I find myself smiling. “You don’t like it, sister?”

“Not really. It’s going to take forever to grow back out.” She glances back down at her displays. “I ought to finish what I’m doing. Getting a count on how much stored food we still have when Diana keeps seizing and moving supplies without updating my databases is hard enough without trying to remember where I stopped.”

“Leave it.” I know my voice is quiet, but something in it must give away my tension because she looks up at me as though really seeing me for the first time. She frowns, starts to protest, falls silent again. Stands up and walks to the window, looking down at the ocean of soiled color filling the streets spread out below us.

Even though part of my mind is counting seconds, I stay silent. As often as I think of Ceres as an innocent, she’s not a stupid woman. Watching the quiet miracles she’s done with our economics, I’ve often wondered if she isn’t cleverer than any of my sisters - it’s only that she so often doesn’t look at the world around her as something independent of the data and problems of supply and demand that make her seem to live in another world.

“Nobody’s really listening to me anymore, are they?” she finally murmurs. “I’m moving imaginary dots around on an imaginary city.”

Now I move to stand beside her, touching her lightly with the hand that isn’t holding the gun. “It’s time to go, starling. Please.”

“What about Tullia?” She turns away from the window at last, her blue eyes searching my face, and for a mad moment I try to imagine reaching my niece through my father’s security. Cold practicality demands that I dismiss the thought. This time, it wins.

“She’ll be safe. Father will get her away.” The lie comes smoothly, and she accepts it without doubt. Ceres has always trusted me. It never hurt me so much to use it before.

Moving back to the desk, she shuts down her terminals with a few quick touches. “Should I bring anything?”

“Just yourself.” I click the safety back into place on the pistol, then slide it up under the jacket of the uniform and into the waistband of the trousers. It sits uncomfortably, but it’ll be secure enough there while still being accessible. She seems to take me at my word, because she only stops long enough to gather up her soft wool shawl before slipping her hand into mine and offering me a small smile of reassurance.

What she could imagine she’s comforting me about, I don’t know, but somehow it settles my nerves. Makes me clear and calm and certain without draining the warmth out of me.

I am still wondering as I tell her to close her eyes and then lead her out through the slaughterhouse in the security vestibule and into the halls. Once I have her safely in the elevator, I press the concealed button for the underground maintenance access tunnels and tell her she can open them again. Another adjustment of the holomap sends out a silent, continuous pulse of signal that tells any live pod that picks it up to turn itself off until the signal stops. Juno doesn’t know I stole her keys.

It’s quite possible that she’ll be dead before she has a chance to find out.

The underground is far more dangerous than the street, but also less monitored. Right now, with my sister whose face is instantly recognizable to any family security system linked to the camera grid in tow, the lack of surveillance is the priority.

The odds may not be in our favor, but fickle fortune is. We twist and wind the nine blocks through the guts of the city in a silence broken only by the hiss of machinery and my sister’s almost silent sounds of distress at the way filth adheres to the edges of her skirt, strangely warmed by each other’s company, and go undisturbed by muttations or hidden dissidents or deathtraps too old to recognize the signal pulsing from my holo. The access lift for the building we need recognizes my code and diverts a car without notifying even the local security net.

“My dress is ruined, sister,” Ceres says in an almost conversational voice as we start our ascent. I turn and blink at her, see the telltale signs of a smile at the corner of her mouth, and then I start - impossibly, wonderfully, madly - to laugh. By the time the lift car spills us into the near-darkness of the hidden hangar, we’re both awash with mirth.

When I can finally speak again, I hug her around the waist and kiss her cheek. “I’ll get you another,” I promise her softly. “As soon as we’re safely away from here.”

“I know you will.” She squeezes my hand, then gives me a gentle shove to separate us. “Now turn on the lights before I trip over something and break my ankle.”

“Sensible starling.” Still chuckling, I have to make an effort to flatten my voice into something the computers will recognize. “Lights. Initiate start-up sequence.”

The cold white lights of the bay flare into harsh life, illuminating the sleek lines of the hovercraft whose hull bears the black-script inscription _Muninn_ , and the word is a delicate knife in my chest while I breath. Memory. When I told the automated system to apply the name, I didn’t know how the word could cut.

I make myself ignore it, escort my sister up into the passenger compartment and show her where the small toilet is. Once she’s safely ensconced there, trying to clean the worst of the soiling from her dress, I unlock the cockpit with another single-use code and reassure myself that the automated reports I’ve been receiving from the hangar for years match the report of the ship’s onboard diagnostics. They do. Painstakingly reconstructed, my private hovercraft is ready to fly.

The touch of a control taps me into the Peacekeeper tactical network. The city is an angry mass of red sparks, signifying active engagements hungry for reinforcements, but Diana’s lines are holding for the moment. A glance is enough to tell me it may not last the hour, much less the day.

It is long past time to go.

 _Muninn_ was rebuilt with only the barest armament, her armor plating restored only to original spec, but she makes up for it with the most sensitive electronics in the air and an exquisitely tuned stealth system. When I lift us on near-silent thrust and engage the cloak of invisibility that turns us into a ghost, I am reasonably certain that the keenest eyes and best sensors in the city will see nothing when I open the bay doors.

Of course, I was reasonably certain that my father was a sane man and the Districts could be brought to see the benefits of service to the Capitol, so I send the signal to open the doors and lift us into the sky before my sister can finish with her dress. If death catches us out of the sky, better that she doesn’t see it coming.

We’re ten miles out from the city’s air defense perimeter before my hands relax on the controls and I realize that Ceres has been sitting in the copilot’s seat wearing only her slip for a while.

“We’re not going back, are we?” I haven’t heard her voice so quiet or frightened since she was a little girl sneaking into my bed to get away from her nightmares.

I reach out for her hand. “Not for a long time, starling. Maybe not ever. But we’re going to be all right. I’m going to make sure of it.”

Just like when she was a child, she believes me. I only hope that I’m not lying to her again. If I am, though, I don’t know it yet. So I squeeze her fingers between mine, then tap my instructions into the autopilot while I lower my voice into a gentle murmur that brings a smile to her face. “‘Second star to the right and then straight on ‘til morning.’”

The smile stays, more or less, until she fall asleep. By then we’re out over the cold white cleanness of the mountains, the sun crawling toward zenith, alone and invisible in the sky. I find myself playing with the short gold strands of my bleached hair and wondering if my _gladiatoria_ is still hunting my father through the streets of my city. Wondering if my _mendacem_ is still alive.

Finally, I turn away from the cold blue horizon and watch Ceres sleep until my eyes close.


	3. Chapter 3

My father is dead. So is Alma Coin. Since the last video evidence of him is his laughter as the crowd crushes over him in their effort to reach the assassin, I allow myself to believe that this would amuse him. Our games taught Katniss Everdeen too well for anyone’s peace of mind, and yet today she is being put on a train back to District Twelve in the full expectation she will be left to rot there as a confirmed lunatic. That this is both precisely what she wanted both times that I met her and exactly what I suggested to my father after he began to see her as a problem is an irony that does not escape me.

I fell asleep last night wondering if it has brought my  _ gladiatora  _ any happiness. I doubt it. She never had my father’s talent for taking pleasure in vengeance, and Primrose Everdeen is dead.

Winter graylight spilling through my windows woke me this morning. No alarms, no waiting messages, no summons to attend my father or urgent data awaiting my evaluation. As I have for the last ten days, I dress in one of my slips and apply my makeup - by hand, a skill I am still relearning the fine points of - and then go down to the kitchen where I make coffee and pull a plain breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread from the maker. The household computer tells me that the current stocks will last at least nine months before consumption or spoilage makes our supply situation difficult. Whether I will be able to go that long before going mad on the dullness of the diet is a more complex question. 

For the moment, however, I am deferring any question with a longer time horizon than a week. It is a strange and unnerving experience, like having suddenly gone terribly near-sighted. I spend my hours drifting from room to room, following or avoiding the sun as the mood takes me, reading or listening to recorded music or simply staring at the play of light and shadow across my furnishings, my sculptures, my paintings and my countless books. Sometimes Ceres wants my company, and I sit and read to her or talk about quiet nights in the country when we were children. 

Sometimes I retreat to my room and enable the holodisplays, loading the recordings of my  _ mendacem _ ’s paintings and staring at them until I cannot bear to look anymore.

This morning, my breakfast finished, I take my coffee out onto the frosted isolation of my veranda and welcome the bite of the wind like thin knives across my skin. The pain gives the snow-draped vista in front of me the tangible weight of reality, drives thought from my mind, chases the ghosts of my dreams back into the house. 

We have been here a little over a month, and I have already realized that time is my enemy. Peace and stillness are all well and good for rest, but when they stretch on and on into indefinite nothingness, they become as crushing as enclosing walls.  My house is full of books I have collected but not yet read and music I have acquired but left unheard; these may last a little while, but like the supplies stored in my retreat’s sophisticated pantry they will only stretch so far. It will be years before I can be sure my sister and I are forgotten enough to allow us to trade and travel freely. 

Years of isolation that are only a prelude to a lifetime of exile.

_ Here I now wander alone as I wonder _

_ Why did you leave me to sigh and complain. _

_ I ask of the roses, why should I be forsaken, _

_ Why must I here in sorrow remain? _

The words boil up against my teeth, the tune trapped in my throat, and only the memory of my father’s hand stinging against my cheek keeps me from hurling my mug of coffee out over the railing in fury.  _ If you can master nothing else, master yourself _ , his voice reminds me, and I find that I am smiling when my anger ebbs. Even dead, my father still chastens me. 

I leave the cold beauty of the winter to fend for itself and go to wake my sister, determined to do something - anything - to keep that airless serenity away.

 

* * *

 

Spring comes grudging and haltingly, sweet cool mornings that melt into sudden heat or pounding rain at whims I can no longer even guess at, and I set my hand to stretching our larder. Instead of would-be revolutionaries, I lay traps for rabbit and deer; I learn the ten miles that ring our new home as I never bothered to when it was only a retreat, mapping the streams which will yield the best fishing and cataloging the plants against those in the botanical census, marking out the game trails and the track of the two bears who share my new hunting ground. It would not be difficult to kill them, but there is no cause to - I have never been wasteful with lives, find that that I do not wish to begin now. Ceres plants a garden; when I ask her when she learned, she only smiles. I begin to count birdsongs.

Summer comes in its turn. I sing and read aloud to drown out the heavy, silent heat; Ceres begins practicing needlework, which she shows little aptitude but much enthusiasm for. The days draw out until night scarcely seems to last a few hours (five at Midsummer - I am irritated enough to measure); for two weeks at the height of the season, I scarcely sleep. News trickles in from the Capitol slowly, grudgingly - my people are gone, networks torn up root and branch, but I can read through a propo to the datastream well enough yet. The reprisals are lighter than I expected, but surgical - exact. Plutarch Heavensbee’s fine hand at work. The arenas are torn down and the ashes of loyal servants of the state quietly mixed into the concrete of their new monuments. Tullia, ostentatiously pardoned in spite of having committed no crime but her birth, is assigned to the care of a very secure boarding school in District 8. That is a mistake - President Paylor’s decision, probably, to use her own district; the Capitol, where they have so meticulously gutted my father’s infrastructure, would have been a better choice. District 8 fell too early and too quickly. I slip messages out into the public information networks, insignificant notices in minor textile publications, then go back to my snares and my birdsong. 

Ceres proves a better gardener than seamstress - her effort with a scarf is untidy and prone to unravelling, but we soon have an abundance of every conceivable sort of vegetable. The zucchini is particularly (exhaustingly) prolific. I expect to discard the excess; efficiency is less important that security. It is two weeks before I realize that her long walks in the woods involve stops at the nearest homesteads with a basket that leaves heavier than it returns. We argue, sharply and at some length, and I am astonished to find her intractable - she freely admits to leaving delivieries quietly on doorsteps, intends to go on with or without my blessing. It is considerably worse than the time she decided (all of seven years old and normally very sensible) to keep the mink that crawled into her skirts on a visit to District 6. I bought her handling gloves then; this time, I teach her to speak without the accent of the Capitol and change the cut of her hair. The sun has already been at work on her skin. And, since we are to be in the business of trade, I insist she try to make a profit at it; it requires only a little effort to validate papers for one Chloe Floros, local steadholder. It is a thin disguise, but I can give her nothing better. 

In a few weeks, my sister goes quite briskly into trade. By the end of the fall, she is renting storage space in the nearest village for stocks of needles, cloth, indulgences and necessities of every kind. A visit from Heavensbee’s people fails to materialize. I set fewer traps and fill the emptiness of her absences with more songs and stories. When the snow settles in, I perform some of them for her over the card table and the chess board; she laughs, cries, smiles for me. By the time the choruses of birds begin to sing in the trees again, I feel as though I may not go mad after all.

She is in the midst of the first week of planting for the new year when I bring her a gift to match that - recordings of Tullia in her dormitory, in her classes, her soft brown hair back in Katniss’s braids again, stiff and composed with her wardens and her teachers but daring the occasional unguarded smile with classmates for whom her name matters less than her wit and the fact that I taught her to pick locks much more sophisticated than the ones on the school garden when she was nine years old. Under the shade of the broad-limbed oak at the corner of her garden, Ceres cradles the viewer against her chest and weeps soundless tears.

“I’ll kill them and fetch her,” I whisper, cold in the spring breeze, but she catches my wrist and holds me like steel. We stay that way a long time, her slim hand still damp with turned soil clamped around the unsteady pulse in my wrist. Finally, wordlessly, she shakes her head.

I wait. She doesn’t explain. “If you change your mind,” I tell her, “you only have to say so.” Her eyes return to the viewer and she releases me; dismissed, I pace the forest until I can breathe again. It rains and I come home wet to the bone. 

Ceres scolds me and dries my clothes. I am, she tells me, the only sister she has left.


End file.
